Empowering Women in Chiropractic -What Should National Sensory Awareness Month Mean To You?

Click here to download the transcript. Disclaimer: The following is an actual transcript. We do our best to make sure the transcript is as accurate as possible, however, it may contain spelling or grammatical errors.  We suggest you watch the video while reading the transcript.

Once again, Elizabeth and I would like to thank ChiroSecure for always having our backs in this wonderful profession and for giving us this platform to help educate the world on kiddos and chiropractic. So Elizabeth is gonna take a nap like she always does while we continue to hang out. All right, you rest well, Elizabeth.

Hi, I am Dr. Monika Buerger, and we're gonna dive into some really fun information today. We're getting you ready for national Sensory Awareness one month oh, national Sensory Awareness Month in October. But we're gonna take a little different spin on it. We want you to I wanna give you some information to get you starting to think and your wheels turning so that you can use this information to help educate your practice members and your community.

Click here for the best Chiropractic Malpractice Insurance

When October hits. So let's dive in and prep you for that time. All right. What is sensory processing disorder and what is Sensi? Sensory Sensitivity Disorder, which is in, isn't really a disorder, but here we go. Sensory processing disorder. That's been around for a long time. Some feel that. The inability to process our sensory environment is the nth degree of those that are challenged on the autism spectrum.

It is not being able to organize, integrate to take in for the brain to process information from its environment. So we have five far senses, sight, smell, sound, taste, touch, but. As I've talked about for years, we also have several internal senses. Our near senses, which are information from our joints and muscles.

Chiropractor should be perking up right about now. It is information from sensory, information from our microbiome, from our visceral, our liver, our kidneys, our ovaries, our heart is a big one. And that's associated a lot with vagal tone. It is from hormones and immune cells. It's from so many actions that happen within the body, whether they're biochemical reactions, cellular reactions, or joint muscle tendon sensations.

Get a Quick Quote and See What You Can Save

Alright, so we have our external senses and we have our internal senses and the brain needs to take in all of this information and organize it and integrate it. So that sensory input in leads to proper motor output. So it's a sensory motor loop. So if we have difficulty, if there's areas of the brain that are circuits that are not talking to each other, and there's a disconnect in the information coming in from our external world and our body, and there's a disconnect between these circuits.

An individual have problems deciphering and integrating and responding properly to that sensory input. So what might that look like? All right. Your your pull, what I call your pull punch, push kiddos. They like a lot of heavy input. They're jumping on couches and chairs and they're kicking the kids' seat in front of them, and they're pushing a lot.

And they can sometimes be labeled as a bully. Oftentimes, they're not getting enough proprioceptive input. Input from our joints and muscles from our spine, big area. All right. So that might manifest as those characteristics in the classroom. Our vestibular kiddos can be the ones that twirl around. They can't sit still in circle time, they're always on the move.

Our visual kiddos that struggle with vision might have difficulty copying from. I have to say whiteboard. Now. My days, it was the blackboard, right? I don't even know, they, I think they use smartboards now, but they have difficulty copying, looking far and then coming down and looking close, those type of things.

They might have trouble with hand eye coordination and playing ball and being able to catch and throw or writing so that those three systems together are the big coones. They work together vi. Vestibular proprioceptive. They are very much a team when it cause comes to fine and gross motor and postal control.

But we have other senses too, right? We have taste, we have tactile, we have auditory. So what you need to understand about sensory processing dysregulation, I don't really like to use the word disorder. But that's the term that's used, by the way. It is not an official disorder, a defining disorder in the DSM five schedule.

Okay. It is a subset of characteristics in the DSM five schedule when it comes to autism, that's as far as it's made it to date. Okay? So you can have a height. Po sensory kiddo, that is like a big, huge, giant cup of coffee. A coffee cup that never can get filled up. They're hypo, they're not getting enough of that information from their environment into the brain.

Okay? So it's like taking a cup of coffee and just pouring it, and they can never fill it up. Or you can have a height per sensory child that's like a wee bit tiny cup of coffee and you just pour a little bit of coffee into it and it spills over super fast and super furious because they can handle just a little bit of sensory input in that particular system.

Now the trick is, in any given moment, actually. We can wax and wane between being hyper sensory to something and hypo. It depends on our autonomic nervous system and how well we can adapt to that environment. Okay, so sensory processing disorder is in difficulty adapting to the sensory input from our environment, whether it be.

External or internal. And there's specific screening evaluation tests we can do. For instance, vestibular system. We can do things like evaluating the stand how long and how well they can stand and balance on one leg or tandem walk visual system, how well the can they track. And how well they can converge and diverge proprioception.

How well they know, where they, how well what is their posture, integrity, how well is their posture control, and how well do they know where their joints are in space? Tactile. If they are blinded to a tactile stimulus, can they locate where it is? Can you on their backs, write a few letters of the alphabet, and they're able to discern what those letters are.

So there's a whole screening mechanism that can happen. But here's what can, here's another thing that can happen as you can have kiddos or individuals, we all can be on this sensory dysregulation spectrum depending on our stress level. But one question I get asked so much, I've been teaching this work for over 30 years.

I have this kiddo that is having a really hard time in school and they just seem to melt and fall apart and be so sensitive to their environment. So I brought 'em in, had the mom came in, we did an evaluation and I'm, they're just. They're not really showing a lot of positive findings. Like they've got great balance and they've got good proprioception and they've got good tactile discernment and they don't seem to have interceptive, GI issues.

And I'm just, I'm not picking up a lot of stuff here, doc, on their evaluation. Fast forward to another more con more recently talked about. Area in the sensory world is the high sensory persons, the sensory sensitive individual, so sensory processing disorders actually trouble processing information from our environment.

A sensory sensitive individual is one that can be highly emotionally sensitive to their environment. And the analogy that's often used is the three flower analogy. So you have an orchid. Orchids are beautiful flowers, right? They're gorgeous, but those darn orchids are extremely temperamental to get them to live.

I've abolished a few of them, unfortunately not on purpose, but they are temperamental. If you literally move them across the room. They don't have the same exact environment and light and et cetera, they can die. Okay? So orchids are incredibly beautiful, but very sensitive to their environment versus a dandelion.

A dandelion. I am actually drinking some dandelion tea right now. A dandelion is a hardy sucker. That thing can grow anywhere, and believe me, I live on over five acres out here in Idaho. And dandelions can grow anywhere. Okay? They are hearty suckers. So you have this temperamental orchid, beautiful flower.

Dandelions are beautiful too. They just have different characteristics, but they are very hearty, and in the middle is the tulip. Tulip is beautiful. Doesn't have a huge long flowering attention span. And it's heartiness is in the middle between the orchid and the dandelion. So in the neuroscience world, that's how they differentiate our different sensory sensitivity phenotypes And what sensory sensitivity is, it's in innate emotional inherited emotional response.

Okay the orchid sensory person also tends to be very empathetic. They're highly empathetic individuals. They're very much very in tune with their environment and with others, they're able to pick up what others need. To feel safe and secure and loved, and oftentimes they forego their needs. So think of the kiddo in school, in the classroom that is, maybe they're not having dysregulation in processing actual sensory input, but they're a highly sensitive person.

That's what they're called, HSPs. Highly sensitive persons, and they innately know when. A classmate's struggling or they see a classmate that's being bullied or the teacher is having a hard day, whatever. And those environmental experiences can really get to their core emotionally. And so they might wanna just tap out, they just might wanna zone out and need to go inward to kinda as a survival response, just like.

A child that has true sensory processing disorder, trouble interpreting their environment, they might check out as well and just go glaze in order to survive. So your distinguishing factor might be in many cases, is to understand how to do a proper sensory motor evaluation across different ages and different stages.

If you're not picking up any gross factors during your evaluation, consider that child, that person is perhaps a high sensory or a high sensitive person. So hopefully that helps. So October is National Sensory Awareness Month. Maybe dive into more of this information, gets your spiel, your lingo in your head so you can help.

Help your community and your practice members a discern maybe where their child, 'cause we're still at the beginning days, months of school. Discern whether their child might be struggling from a dysregulation of information coming in their brain or maybe needs a little bit more emotional support backing, love acknowledgement.

One of the best things you can do is acknowledge the feelings of that person, of that child, that they're not oversensitive, they're not overreacting. That is innately who they are. Last thing, how does chiropractic fit into both paradigms here? One, I'm gonna cover a little bit more for the chiropractic practitioner and two for how the adjustment.

Can affect sensory dysregulation or sensory processing. We know that from a number of years of research especially with Dr. Heidi Hoick and her team outta New Zealand, that specific chiropractic adjustments on a truly subluxated segment, not just a random manipulation anywhere. Has the ability to alter the way the brain processes incoming information, especially in key areas like the cerebellum, the prefrontal cortex the default mode network, key brain regions that are gonna be imperative for good interpretation and integration and proper motor response in sensory processing.

Disorders or dysregulation. Now, let's take a minute. For the highly sensitive sensory person that is often the chiropractor, chiropractors, we use our hands, we use touch, we innately believe, and we connect with our patients. And these are big characteristics of the highly sensitive orchid person.

The problem is they can be so empathic and they don't take time for themselves because they see the need in others so frequently that they give, and this is the number one, one of the number one characteristics that we end up having burnout. And I'm getting a lot of messages and.

Emails and things these days of Hey can we just talk for a few minutes? I'm really burned out and I'm just, I'm having a hard time coping and so forth, and so I get on the phone and the, again, we are such a unique profession and we love and we give and we do and we serve, but we can also be orchids that are not getting fed properly.

My message to you is the world needs us more than ever these days. So make sure you take time out to feed water, fertilize yourself and understand that you're not oversensitive. You just need a little quiet time and love yourself because that's what's gonna help us keep going.

Hopefully you enjoyed that information and you're able to integrate some of this starting October 1st to help educate your practice members as to why their kiddos need to be checked for vertebral subluxations and potential sensory dysregulation. If you wanna know more about how to discern the differences, how to do a keen eye.

Sensory motor evaluation from a chiropractic lens. Then you need to scroll down. You don't have time to wait. You need to scroll down right now. You need to join our foundations of Neurodevelopmental Practices. It's an online certification program like none other out there, but we need you now. So scroll down, jump in the program and let's do this together.

Today's pediatric show Look to the Children was brought to you by.

Click here for the best Chiropractic Malpractice Insurance

Get a Quick Quote and See What You Can Save